EBay, Walmart to develop search engines in web marketing push

[Brave7]

EBay Inc and Walmart Stores Inc are developing Web search engines to better compete against Amazon.com Inc in the fast-growing e-commerce market.

As more people shop online, they often end up at the top of a website typing in a product name. If they cannot find what they want quickly, they will likely go to a rival website or venture into a physical store. “Amazon is on version 8.0 of search,” said Scot Wingo, chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, which helps merchants sell more online. “EBay is at 2.0, but they are thinking about how they make this huge leap to 3.0.”

The stakes are high because e-commerce is a huge, fast-growing market, putting billions of dollars in sales up for grabs.

US retail spending online grew 13 per cent to $161.5 billion last year, according to comScore.

Physical retail sales are much larger, but the sector is struggling to grow and losing share to online operators.

EBay’s search technology, known as Voyager, dates back to the first dot-com boom a decade ago. After the company appointed Mark Carges as chief technology officer in 2008, he tested eBay’s search engine by typing in “iPod.”

A car topped the list of results because the seller noted in the listing title that it came with an iPod adapter. “Search was clearly broken in 2008,” Carges said.

Since then, eBay has gone on a hiring spree to fix search. The number of employees working in that area has tripled to more than 150.

EBay also poached several engineers from Microsoft Corp’s Bing search unit, including Ken Moss, who runs the Seattle office, and Hugh Williams, who oversees eBay’s new search engine, Cassini, to be rolled out in 2013.

“More customers, plus better search, means people buy more stuff,” eBay Chief Executive John Donahoe said in a recent interview.

Cassini will trawl full product descriptions, rather than just the titles of listings, and match search queries to photographs of products, while taking into account information about the seller and the buyer.

By crunching data on what shoppers have bought and browsed on eBay in the past, Cassini search results should be more tailored to their intent. For instance, if a shopper types in “HP,” Cassini will know if the person means horsepower or Hewlett-Packard Co, Williams said. “Voyager is pretty literal. It takes a query and matches it faithfully against the title of items. It’s not intuitive,” he said. “Cassini will take the user’s query and understand that.”

The search engine project takes time because eBay’s online marketplace has so much variable information from millions of listings that are described differently by each seller — something known as unstructured data in the tech world.

In contrast, Amazon typically starts with a catalog of items it has for sale, including strict product descriptions, which are easier to search.

http://business-standard.com/india/n...g-push/473622/

I like the concept to have more choice like any user. Do you think it will help marketing your own business?

[traxport121]

Companies developing their own search engines - yes its a good marketing tactic specially when you have a wide range of products and a large customer base. Given the scale at which Walmart is operating, its not surprising that they would come up with such marketing technique